Arthur Levine: ‘This Work Is Too Important To Politicize’

Periodically, someone will send me an article by Andrew Wolf attacking me. My favorite was published the day before Christmas and included high school pictures of Mr. Wolf and me. We both looked a lot better then. It turns out that we graduated in the same year from the same high school. In his latest broadside, Mr. Wolf asserted yet again that Teachers College and I were destroying public education. I must admit that there are times in which I have been so depressed by the condition of inner city schools nationally that the idea had some appeal. But educationally, I am a pragmatist. I will support anything that can be demonstrated to work in improving the achievement of our children in schools. I cross ideological divides often, supporting both vouchers for inner-city children in failing schools and universal preschool programs starting at age 3. Mr. Wolf is forever trying to paint me – together with the faculty members of Teachers College – as wild-eyed radicals intent on doing damage to American education. It has nothing to do with reality.

For example, he accuses the college of foisting a balanced literacy program on New York City, saying balanced literacy isn’t “substantiated by scientific research.” In fact, there are no solid national numbers at this point, but here is one very powerful illustration of the success of balanced literacy in New York City itself: In District 15, where Deputy Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina first deployed the balanced literacy curriculum in 1999, the percentage of students meeting or exceeding reading standards in grades 3-8 has climbed 10 percentage points over the past four years, with a 2.4 percentage-point increase from 2003 to 2004 alone.

That one-year increase was tops in the city. Boston and San Diego have also enjoyed strong success with balanced literacy. Furthermore, the top reading experts in the country, serving on a nonpartisan National Research Council panel on reading, examined the published research on reading, considering only the scientifically based research. What works best, they concluded, was an approach that can only be described as balanced literacy. They were crystal clear in saying neither phonics alone, nor whole language instruction by itself, was sufficient. Different children learn best in different ways.

Let’s turn to Mr. Wolf’s remarks about the New York City Council Commission on Fiscal Equity, which I am co-chairing. This committee has been given the task by the council of developing a plan for how to best invest more than $14 billion in revenues owed to our schools because the courts say they have been systematically under funded by the state. Mr. Wolf charges the committee and I are tools of the City Council speaker, a campaign committee of sorts charged with dreaming up an education platform for a mayoral run.

This insults me. It insults the committee. It insults the speaker and the City Council. But worst of all it threatens to deprive the city’s children of a better education.

The billions of dollars coming to the city are a once-in-a-lifetime chance for our schools. The city could spend it on a lot of things – reducing class sizes, creating preschools, expanding summer and after-school programs, strengthening the teacher corps, rebuilding old schools and opening new ones, updating facilities, increasing the quantity and quality of learning materials, starting more small schools, and the list goes on and on. We can’t do all of these things. The goal of the commission is to recommend the combination of activities that will have the greatest impact on improving the education of the city’s children.

New York is not the first city to have this opportunity. But it could be the first to use the additional revenue wisely. Other cities have wasted it, with little if any consequences for their children. We cannot afford to let this happen in New York. The commission hired one of the most eminent educators in America to serve as our executive director, Tony Alvarado, who gained national prominence for having made dramatic improvements in two New York City school districts. Despite what Mr. Wolf writes, Tony Alvarado is widely believed to be one of the most successful school reformers in the country, an expert in developing urban school teachers and administrators.

The commission has read widely in the research on school improvement, and met with experts both conservative and liberal on topics varying from class size and leadership to facilities and after-school programs. We have held more than 35 hours of hearing, encouraged e-mails, asked for letters, provided opportunities for videotaping testimony, and even set up an interactive Web site to seek the counsel of the people of our city. At each of the many hearings the commission conducted, I opened the session with the same words. “This Commission champions no office holder, no candidate for office, no political party and no ideology. Our only client is the children of New York.”

Please understand this work is too important to politicize. The aim of the commission is to build a big tent for its recommendations. We hope they will be embraced by office holders and candidates of all political stripes as well as the people who work, attend, and, send their children to the New York public schools. Let us finish our work.

ARTHUR LEVINE
President, Teachers College, Columbia University
Manhattan

Forum To Address Bias

Re: “Bias of Massad Is Being Noted in His Class,” Jacob Gershman, Page 1, February 7, 2005. How sickening to read what passes for education in Joseph Massad’s Columbia University classroom. It’s not surprising, however. Every public and private campus has its share of “revolutionaries” who think proselytization is synonymous with education. I’ve made it my business not to be silent when this phenomenon raises its ugly head at a CUNY campus. Notwithstanding the superb renaissance at CUNY under our chancellor Matthew Goldstein, no university is immune from the leftist overall bent amongst the faculty. I’m not “hunting” for it “a la McCarthy”; there are simply those who think that imposing their sometimes-racist bias constitutes acceptable academic instruction.

Therefore, the New York region of the American Jewish Congress will host a public forum, at no charge, to give voice to this issue through eyewitness testimony by professors and students at its headquarters at 825 Third Avenue on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 at 6 p.m. You may reserve your seat by calling 212-360-1587, extension 587.

Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, trustee
City University of New York
Manhattan

Wooster Group Disappoints

Helen Shaw may regard it a “privilege” to watch the workshops of the avant-garde Wooster Group, but ordinary people who expect that theater make sense might want to think twice about attending one of its productions [“Still Alive & Kicking at 30,” Arts & Letters, February 8, 2005].

Whenever critics resort to buzzwords – “confront,” “provoke,” “subvert,” “difficult,” and so on – one can be certain that whatever is being discussed is unintelligible, and not art. Ms. Shaw’s profile of Wooster includes some choice examples, which readers should have no difficulty in identifying.

As Ms. Shaw reports, what the Wooster does best is “explode and re-assemble canonical works.” In the 1980s, for example, it was known for “challenging classic texts with … complicated physical scripts, and technology.” It was not merely “cutting edge,” she notes, but on the “very edge of the cutting edge.” An earlier work was made of “intellectually complicated games,” and the company’s reputation was assured when it engaged in such “shocking violations of convention” as nearly naked actors “gaily urinating on the floor.”

According to Ms. Shaw, the complexity of a Wooster production “can tie a critical theorist into knots.” It is usually somewhat “intimidating,” she allows, and the “difficulty of penetrating the many layers of [its] baroque collages might make you feel silly.” Not, of course, if you sense that they are, in fact, impenetrable. “Who doesn’t hate that feeling of ‘not getting it’?” Ms. Shaw asks. No one, for sure, but not if there is nothing to “get.” Not to worry, though – the productions “don’t require a key,” she explains, “they only require effort.”

With all that, Ms. Shaw assures the hesitant reader that the Woosters are no longer on the “razor’s edge.” Perhaps that is so. But from her account it seems likely that they are still on the “cutting edge,” if not on the edge of so sharp an instrument as a razor.

LOUIS TORRES
Mr. Torres is co-editor of Aristos (www.aristos.org), an online review of the arts
Manhattan

CUNY Faculty Treated Unfairly

As a member of the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, I would like to take this opportunity to respond to your recent editorial “Inside the CUNY Union” [February 7, 2005]. First of all, the document that your editorial refers to was not some leaked memorandum, as implied, but was a public statement from the PSC delegate assembly declaring a “state of emergency” in its ongoing contract negotiations. This emergency is a direct result of the CUNY administration’s continued policy of absolute austerity in its contract negotiations over the last two years.

The administration’s only offer, which is the first in almost three years and which it refuses to negotiate, was an insulting salary increase of 1.5% over four years, with a 0% increase in the first and fourth years. This increase does not even come close to covering half of the documented cost of living increase of 3.8% for New York City in the last 12 months, not to mention the amount of expected inflation for the life of the contract. In addition to this, the editorial fails to mention the salary increases of up to 40% that the board of trustees recently awarded CUNY administrators. Besides the important issue of wage increases, the administration has also refused to bargain with the union on important issues of health care and the PSC Welfare Fund, cynically arguing that other private-sector employees do not even receive health care benefits at all and that the union should somehow be happy with the inadequate coverage that it currently has.

The fact is that CUNY professors and adjuncts are woefully underpaid. In fact, thanks to the administration, the majority of teaching that takes place on CUNY campuses is provided by graduate students and experienced adjuncts who make far less than $35,000 a year, sometimes receiving as little as $3,000 per class per semester with absolutely no job security and no guarantee of health care benefits. The union has repeatedly asked the administration to increase the number of full-time and tenured faculty, but instead the administration has continued to allow the colleges to rely increasingly on cheap adjunct labor. If you ask me, The New York Sun and the taxpayer’s of New York should be supporting the faculty and students of CUNY rather than shamelessly praising an administration that refuses to bargain fairly with its employees. As for the Taylor Law, it is an anachronistic and unambiguously unfair and anti-union law and I applaud you for so kindly pointing this out to your readers, since depriving city unions of their only form of real protest creates an unfair and uneven bargaining situation.

JAMES HOFF
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Manhattan

Who Subsidizes Whom?

The New York Sun headline “Tax-Free Shopping Means State-Subsidized Spree” [Dina Temple-Raston, Business, February 2, 2005] was a revelation to me. I’d always thought that we taxpayers subsidize the state, not the other way around.

JUDITH S. WEIZNER
Bronxville, N.Y.

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